All argument consists in proceeding from the
known to the unknown, in persuading people that the new
thing you want them to think is not essentially different
from or at any rate is not inconsistent with the old things
they think already. This is the method of science,
just as much as it is the method of rhetoric and poetry.
But, as between science and forms of appeal such as poetry,
there is a great difference in the nature of the link that
joins the new to the old. Science shows that the new
follows from the old according to the same principles that
built up the old. “If you don’t accept what I now ask you to
believe,” the scientist says, “you have no right to go on
believing what you believe already.” The link used by
science is a logical one. Poetry and rhetoric are also
concerned with bridging the gap between the new and the old;
but they do not need to build a formal bridge.
What they fling across the intervening space is a mere
filament such as no sober foot would dare to tread. But it
is not with the sober that poetry and eloquence have to
deal. Their te,
their essential power, consists in so intoxicating us that,
endowed with the recklessness of drunken men, we dance
across the chasm, hardly aware how we reached the other
side. (Arthur Waley,
The Way and its Power: a Study of the Tao Te Ching and its
Place in Chinese Thought [London: George Allen and Unwin, 1934, 96-97])

Thinking and Speaking a Better World, Third
International Conference on Argumentation, Rhetoric, Debate and
the Pedagogy of Empowerment, Department of Philosophy,
University of Maribor, Slovenia, October 22-24

Second International Conference on Logic, Argumentation,
and Critical Thinking, Centre for the Study of Argumentation
and Reasoning, Faculty of Psychology,
Diego Portalés University,
Santiago, October 7-9

COMMA 2010,
International Conference on Computational Models of Argument (COMMA),
University of Brescia, Italy, September 8-10

van Eemeren, Frans H., Rob Grootendorst, J. Anthony Blair,
and Charles Willard, eds. Perspectives and Approaches, Analysis and
Evaluation, Reconstruction and Application, Special Fields and Case Studies:
Vols. I - IV: Proceedings of the Third ISSA [International Society for the
Study of Argument] Conference on Argumentation. Amsterdam:
International Centre for the Study of Argumentation, 1995.